Muddled and Muddling

How is it that I am on vacation, and I don't seem to have enough time? No stacks of papers to grade. No class announcements or essay cycle assignment sheets to put together. Yet no time. Time, clearly, is relative.

I'm working now on trying to revise an article submission that I got a "revise and resubmit" on, and right now I seem to be spinning my wheels. Muddling, I call it. I think the deeper I feel muddled the better the overall end product (I hope) will be. The root of this muddling is questioning my thinking and evaluating what I have written, and most importantly sitting like a chess player staring at the chess board imagining fifteen possible moves and the trajectory for each. The danger in this muddle business is paralysis.

The foundation for revision, as I articulated for my students this semester, is rethinking. Changing your thinking, deepening, rounding out, adding to, recasting, clarifying your thinking becomes the basis for revision. To accomplish this rethinking, I've been reading a number of Fall 2012 Composition Forum articles on transfer, Kelly Pender's article on invention in The Changing of Knowledge in Composition, and Bryon Hawk's Counter-History of Composition which has led to numerous references to other work. Hence, the muddle.

My reading has been focused on deepening the "So What?" answer I might have to rhetorical reflection by linking it to contemporary notions of invention as tying into complex systems. I've also been looking for more anchors to my statements that reflection is predominantly a retrospective practice in our pedagogy. I've found some additional ammunition in the literature on transfer, but I've also found some support for the idea of in-context, in-task reflection and its connection to transfer.

My biggest challenges for revision so far are my desire to restructure the piece. I believe I start down a path with the concept of "frameworks" and then sets up a binary that is not useful. However, I want to provide some picture, some perspective, some recognition of our current commonplace for reflection. I am struggling as well with the term of "curricular reflection." I think I need to let it go because it has detracting and confusing connotations. I'm thinking "retrospective reflection" will work better, but I am still staring at the chess board on that one and thinking of alternate moves (and not really coming up with any).

So the big challenge is to create this "thinking" section which is intended to reveal our current practice and provide some recognition. Then set up the rethinking section which presents the framework of rhetorical reflection.

I think currently the Dewey/Schon section needs tightening, and I need to highlight the connections between Schon's reflection in action and the dialogic conversation of rhetorical reflection. Then I need to position this pedagogical activity more clearly as an act of invention, as a heuristic designed to promote invention or re-invention within the writing process.

One last point, Yancey poses an interesting question in her discussion about transfer by observing that we are not clear about the difference between awareness and knowledge. This question made me immediately think of my conceptual code related to "coming to know" that "to see is to know." Recognition, which we could say is a form of awareness, represents knowledge. I don't know. I have to think more about it.

This muddle still is confused, but I am staring at the chess board and soon to move.

Replication Study of Rhetorical Reflection

I want now to outline the basic research design of my replication study of my dissertation research.

General Goals of Study:
I have to ask my self seriously whether this replication is really targeted at verification at this point. If so, it changes the whole nature of the study. Grounded theory is about theory generation, not verification, so if I tip over to verification I would be altering my original study to greatly. I must maintain a sense that I am still evolving and discovering this theory. If I want to "verify," I think that needs to be another study.

However, I think verification has a double-meaning within grounded theory methodology. Verification runs through out the method of constant comparison and what might be called the double-movement of grounded theory data analysis (or coding). Here is how it works. I observe the data closely, naming phenomena, and beginning to state understandings or meanings about what is going on. When I go from my sense of "what is going on" and then look again at the data to see if what I think is going on is really going on--that is a kind of verification. As I do this same checking by comparing one instance with another instance--that is verification too. Selective coding, at least as I understood it, was a form of verification around a core concept. You took that core concept and then checked to see if it fit and worked through various instances. Hence, I think I need not be afraid of verification because it is within the fiber of grounded theory methodology, but I don't think I should start there.

Outline of Research Design:

Sample:
Six "essay cycles" from my students between Essay #2 draft 1 and draft 2.
This might be followed with another set in either draft E3-2 to E3-3 or E4-3 to E4-3.
(I'm thinking for this round I will keep it smaller and more manageable).
Data includes: assignment, draft 1, peer responses, writing review, and next draft

Coding Procedure:
 recode a fresh set of data following the procedure I used for slice 5
--initial coding and memoing
--perhaps chart the dynamic of rhetorical reflection (?)
--create problem-analysis chart of essay cycle
--further memoing and diagraming
--attempt to replicate selective coding around comparison, assessment, judgment made in terms of essay success


Member Checking:
Since I have access to students this time, I am able to talk to them about their writing, reflections, and thinking. Once I have my data and some conclusions, I will talk to them.

Final Memoing comparing my impressions with those thoughts stated by the students.

This replication can not be called "exact" and perhaps not even "approximate" or "adaptive." So my categories fall apart this quickly!  This research is really an extension. If seeks replication but it also seeks to follow the initial trajectory of the original research--taking it to the next step or level that the original research did not reach.

Hmm... So is extension really replication? In this case I believe so because grounded theory is a set of repetitions and replications of constant comparative analysis over an over again.

One complicating factor that definitely makes this replication study approximate is that I am using my own students. I already feel some anxiety about who to choose to include in this study. I know these students. How do I pick this sample based on theoretical reasons and not any sort of rationale based on getting a "representative sample" as in experimental designs?

What will be the theoretical basis for my selection? Could I base this selection upon my theory of the spectrum of reflectiveness? Between reflections that predominantly tell/report vs. those that consider/evaluate? I would anticipate to see either a high or low degree of reflectiveness (in the form of comparison, assessment, and judgment made in terms of essay success) within these different populations. Am I setting up to great a "checking" with this hypothesis testing sample section rationale?

I think at this point I will have to ponder my sample section a bit more. Perhaps continue to review my previous research up to this point and see what I wanted for the next slice of data.

Principles of Replication in Composition Studies

Becky Rickly spoke to me often about the importance of RAD research designs--replicable, aggregable, and data-driven. I believe this term goes back to a Richard Haswell article in Written Communication back in April 2005, but it likely has a wider circulation and history. I admit my philosophical acceptance of this approach to research as well as my high regard for Haswell's thinking and scholarship. But it has all been abstract for me--I've never replicated a study. I attempted to set up my own dissertation research as "RAD," but to date I have not replicated it.

So this post will begin the articulation and planning for my own replication study. I need to put up or shut up (even in my own mind) when it comes to replication. I tend to focus on replication because the other two elements of RAD seem to me to be basic parts of any legitimate research design. It will be emperical (or data-driven) and the sampling and analysis of this data should be presented in such a format that it could be compared to other similar studies. I have often wondered why composition studies has resisted replication so much. It gets no respect. I believe it is getting more respect now, but so far I have not seen it highlighted in any CCC articles.

Before I chart out my own replication study, I want to state a few principles of replication that occur to me. I have not as yet read any literature or scholarship on replication other than Haswell (and Johanek discusses it as well). I think for composition studies replication does not have to mean "exact reproduction" of a previous research study to be meaningful. Replication might exist along a spectrum that might run from exact to approximate reproduction to adapted reproduction.

Spectrum of Replication in Composition Research

Exact reproduction----Approximate----Adapted

Which place along this spectrum any replication study would inhabit would depend upon the type of study and the goals of the researcher. My impression of scientific research  that is more experimental and positivistic is that exact reproduction is very important. The study can not be called a replication unless it is exactly done as the previous study. However, I am sure that compromises happen even in the most diligently pursued exact replication study. Composition though is not a hard science, but as Louis Wetherbee Phelps states a "human science." That means it is a highly interpretive, social, and contextual "science" that should not seek the same kinds of exact knowledge as that found in the physical sciences. Psychology, sociology and some education research certainly can serve as models for a more scientific approach to the study of writing, but I don't necessarily think we need to go back to the control group experimental studies of the 60s and 70s. Where that method seems warranted, yes. Let's experiment. The first principle of replication, then, for composition studies is that exact replication is not a prerequisite for engaging in a replication study. As long as the researcher is open about the new limits--and possible adaptations--to the study and can articulate a good rationale for the reduction of the scale of the study (approximate) or the changing of some of the research design (adapted), then I think this replication is allowable. Going too far in reducing the scale or changing the design will result in nullifying the link between the two studies, so there is a degree of change from the exact reproduction that can go too far. What that degree of change is obviously would be a subject for debate among researchers.

Can we replicate qualitative research studies?
Why not? Although qualitative research is founded (sorry for that word...) upon the subjectivity of the researcher and her interpretations, I think that we gain tremendous value by having another researcher bring her subjectivity to the same research question. Just because previous research was based upon another's individual and subjective interpretations, does not mean someone else could not consider the same phenomena or data.
So another principle of replication in composition studies is that ANY methodology (not just experimental designs) can be replicated.

But what about sampling?
Unless the replicating researcher has access to the same data, it will inevitably be the fact that replication studies will use different samples. Does that then invalidate the replication? I think it depends. For a replication study to be credible, it must find a sample that is similar enough to the original sample to be comparable. I should note that in some cases one of the most interesting part of a replication study might be the change of the sample taken. For instance, what if we replicated Emig's study of the composing process of 12th graders, but instead of middle class whites from a good school constituting the sample we used 12th graders at a poor predominantly hispanic population at a high school from the West side of San Antonio. That would be an example of an interesting "Adapted" replication study.
I think the third principle of replication for composition studies is the acceptance that sampling will diverge from the original study, but the researcher should seek comparative and approximate samples to the original (unless the study moves to adapt the sample).

How about methodology and methods?
Theoretically, I believe that replication should take special care to follow the methodology and methods of the previous research study. In practice, however, this may be quite difficult for two reasons: 1) the scale of the original study may be so large that following the exact methodology could be difficult (in that case, the replication study becomes "approximate" at a smaller scale), and 2) the original research design may have flaws in either its methodological approach or implementation of methods (an all too frequent occurrence in composition research). In this case, the researcher has some decisions to make. I would say that if a researchers did make minor changes to the methodological orientation and use of methods the replication could still be called "exact" or "approximate." However, if some significant adjustment to the methods is made then the study must make clear it is "adapting" the study to improve its research design. Perhaps subsequent replications would then benefit from these methodological fixes. The fourth principle then has to do with methodology.


How about results?
Aggregable is the term RAD uses to describe how results from various replicated studies could be compared and put together. I want to suggest that aggregation may be possible in a lot of cases, but too forced in others. We have to allow for a principle of "interpolation" between results of different studies. This interpolation between different replicated studies constitutes the most interesting reason why we would want to replicate in the first place. The principle of interpolation acknowledges various contexts and various subjectivities and seeks for meaningful convergences, divergences, and patterns between them.

Now that I have these principles in mind, my next post will articulate the replication study I am embarking on this Spring.

Pounding the Rock

A number of sports teams, including the San Antonio Spurs, use a motivational device to promote persistence and determination in the face of unsatisfactory results.  It is the term, "Pounding the rock." Keep pounding the rock and eventually it will break. You pound and you pound and nothing--and then finally, something. This saying seems to capture how I am feeling post-phd. I have been pounding the rock and not gotten anywhere so far.

Most notably, I was thinking of this saying this morning as I returned to working on an article. This is my basic "rethinking" article on rhetorical reflection. I think I tugged over two sentences for two hours. Pounding and pounding. I think I finally pulled through that section, and so I am finally moving into sections that I hope will be easier to write. Somehow I need to find a way to weave in and leverage my diss work more easily, but constructing the essay is like weaving a complex tapestry with so many strands and a larger picture and pattern that I don't have completely in focus yet. I need to remind myself to keep pounding and pounding. At a certain point in the diss, I felt like I had direction and a clear path. But here I feel as if I have a dim direction and the path is choked with a jungle of brush. Perhaps it is the different context of writing for publication that has me stymied. So far I have not done so well on the publication front since my article for Pedagogy was rejected, though at least they reviewed it. The objections are well warranted, and I think I might be able to present my "how to" article to them. When I can get around to writing it. That is article #2.

One issue that I have not been able to resolve is what to call "curricular reflection." This term has no legs and was specifically disliked in my reviews. The two alternatives I am thinking of right now are comprehensive reflection (from Ramage and Bean) and constructive reflection (from Yancey). Comprehensive fits best, but then I am not sure I want to use someone else's term. Constructive is not quite right when we think strictly in Yancey terms because she has the second category of Reflection in Presentation, and I want this term to cover both. Constructivist Reflection? Ack.  I don't much like that one either. So I am presently stuck thinking of a better term. Constructionist Reflection? What's the difference between construct -ivist and -ionist? I must think more. And keep pounding the rock. I'd like to have a draft of this essay done before we return to the semester.

Dreaming of My Digital Writing Workshop

I am near the end of Troy's book The Digital Writing Workshop. It is filled with excellent ideas, and my mind is twirling and swirling with ideas. I know from many previous experiences integrating technology and attempting various other kinds of digital writing that conceiving digital writing assignments is easier than implementing them. The road to ruin is created with the best intentions and the most well laid out plans. My sense is to craft a course that has an elegance or simplicity to it where digital writing is simply there and constantly done. My current writing classes happen within digital learning environments, but they seldom get beyond text and image on the page--I have not made the leap to video and voice on the screen.

So let me for a few moments here imagine a new direction for my teaching. I wonder if a useful approach to start is to explore how a single subject or "theme" (in good traditional composition terms) might be re-presented and repurposed in various mediums. Write a piece first as text fitting and fulfilling the various textual conventions such as form, organization, development and standard edited English. (Reaching competency with this written communication often is difficult enough in a writing class.) But then take that theme and re-present it as a podcast. Make a Powerpoint presentation of the piece. Make a digital video expressing the ideas.  I wonder then about going the opposite direction. Create a digital video about a topic and then go backwards. Turn it into a Powerpoint. Create a podcast of the piece. Write it up as an "essay." This cross-medium approach might be really interesting, but it goes against some of our concepts regarding genre and how the shape or medium of the piece will fit the medium. Some genres work best for certain kinds of messages. Still this approach would engage students in experiencing and learning about the differences in these media for communicating. The problem is the material production for each media is fraught with peril in terms of functional literacy using the technology. I wonder also how shifting into different media complicates students' task representation, making it more likely that they will misunderstand and mistake the composing task.

Another element I would love to incorporate is an actual Writing Workshop where students picked what they wrote about and progressed independently in their writing. Many composition classrooms, including my own, seem to be an all-class forced march through the writing process, draft to draft, due date to due date. It is refreshing and scary to think of "letting go" the curriculum in terms of dictating writing assignments and process. Perhaps I am only thinking of letting go some and creating a more "open structure" to my curriculum and thinking. I wonder about how digital tools might help this effort. I might still have general goals and requirements to a writing task, but students then seek to fill those requirements and reach those goals on their own.

One thing I'd like to try is student blogs as the foundation of the Writing Workshop. Students regularly must post blogs that are not like this (ideas splashed on the page), but carefully thought out pieces of digital writing on topics of their choice. I think the idea blogs are important too, but these might be more formal "texts." Ideally, these also would go into a larger publication space like Youth Voices where college writers from across the country might also be posting their writing. College Voices. This online space would be a rhetorical forum where students would enter a writing community larger than just our class. Certainly, these writers could post other kinds of digital writing as well such as podcasts or digital videos. It would be nice if the interface could also accommodate the publication of compilations or e-zine like pieces. Since my two composition classes next semester are online, I wonder if I could try any of these new approaches.

I've dreamed enough for the moment. Thanks Troy for your book.

Form and Surprise in Composition

I have been continuing my tutelage under Troy Hicks and the Digital Writing Workshop, but I also began my study of Ramage and Bean's work, particularly Bean. I am planning to study Ramage and Bean with the thought to use their ideas to craft some workshops for faculty in other disciplines at my school (also, I hope to get me to rethink my own assignments).

They begin their textbook, which I did not realize was a textbook, discussing why college freshmen who are inexperienced writers do not go through the entire writing process. They focus on two reasons. One reason they label as "alienation" to describe the disconnectedness of the classroom assignment from a real writing situation. The writing is only a game played by the professor's rules, and these rules seem arbitrary and incomprehensible. The student puts little investment in real communication because it is a silly game they are forced to play to get a grade. As long as writing is a school activity, this first hindrance to writing is hard to overcome completely.

The second reason, though, is interesting to me given my focus on rhetorical reflection. I will quote a part of their text:

"For some reason, they [students] don't seem obsessed by the need to write successive drafts. Why is this so?

" Inexperienced writers, we believe, don't go through the writing process because they haven't learned to pose for themselves the same kinds of problems that experienced writers pose.  ... they have not learned how to 'problematize' their experience" (4).

The entire writing process involves problems and choices, and the awareness of some standard or criteria for what is working or not working, right or wrong, that then defines when something is problematic. I've tagged this standard for the writing classroom as the "idea of essay success" and the "ideal text/writer." Part of why I believe Writing Reviews and rhetorical reflection have value is because it engages students in this thinking about their writing and prompts them to work through the problems and choices of writing as a way to develop a "habit of mind." The practice of Writing Reviews as a way of prompting rhetorical reflection "poses" for inexperienced writers some of the kinds of problems that experienced writers pose.

Hopefully, it would help develop unaided and unprompted habits of rhetorical reflection for writers as they become more experienced. This capacity for unprompted rhetorical reflection would constitute transfer.

I look forward to learning from Ramage and Bean.

Before I leave today's post, I want to bring up one other point they discuss and relate it to something I was reading in Troy's book. While defining their understanding of the book's chief concepts--form and surprise--they use the law of thermodynamic as a metaphor to describe surprise in writing. Basically, this law says that the greater the degree of temperature difference, the greater the amount of energy transferred. They say, "Writers aiming for 'surprise' in their essays might imagine themselves conveying energy (the writer's view of a topic) across a gap to a reader existing at a different temperature (a different view of the topic)" (16). As I begin working on my general article on rhetorical reflection, I feel that I can certainly build on the "temperature" difference that lies between the typical way of viewing reflection and that or rhetorical reflection. I saw more evidence of curricular reflection in the description of Dawn Reed's curriculum for creating a podcast in Troy's book. Included at the end of the six page curriculum description is an assignment titled, "This I Believe Informative Speech and Podcasting Reflection." The prompt for the written reflective piece starts this way: "Compose a one-page-minimum typed reflection explaining what you learned from the This I Believe podcasting project" (71). There it is--post-task reflection designed to promote constructivist learning within a context of evaluation. I feel that the "temperature" difference between the common portfolio-centric view of reflection and that of rhetorical reflection is fairly large. Hence, I believe my article can build on a strong element of surprise.

Reflection Saturday

Yesterday was a San Antonio Writing Project Super Saturday that focused on reflection, and I thought I would process the event a bit. Mainly, I want to process my own keynote presentation and the presentation on reflection in the Summer Institute by Chelsea Silvas.

I really think Chelsea is on to something important regarding the kind of learning that participants experience in the five-week NWP Summer Institutes. Her foundational perspective on reflection comes from Jack Mezirow's notions of Transformational Learning and the role that reflection plays. Mezirow believed that through reflection upon our assumptions or beliefs we are able change these beliefs (which he calls "meaning schemes") or more importantly our "meaning perspectives" (which he labels "meaning perspectives): “Critique and reassessment of the adequacy of prior learning, leading potentially to its negation, are the hallmarks of reflection” (110). So far Chelsea has not surfaced Mezirow's notions of reflection at this level or dug into his notions of content, process, and premise reflection. Also, so far she leans on Higgins et. al. for a definition of "critical reflection" to refer to this evaluative aspect at the heart of the "critique and reassessment" generated through reflection. I believe she will sort these things out. 

But I think she is right in line with Mezirow's emphasis in the importance of "validation of knowledge" for learners and the crucial role reflection plays in this validation process.

What Chelsea has identified is three sites for this reflection and validation process to happen. I am going to put her labels for these sites and then the spaces within the ecology of a Summer Institute where these reflections happen:

1. Other's Experiences--throughout the SI teachers share their classroom experiences in the morning journaling and in countless other informal instances of talk. It could happen in the discussion after a teaching demo, at lunch, or even in peer groups, but it all has the fundamentally similar characteristic of teachers sharing specific instances of teaching and specific experiences from their professional life as teachers.
2. Narratives--I believe Chelsea is focusing this site of reflection around the writing participants do for the writing pieces. I am not sure that this label will work because not all participants write narratives (at least I didn't). Perhaps Writing or Teachers as Writers would work better. Nevertheless, this site focuses on teachers put in the role of writers.
3. Community Learning--Three aspects of the SI fall into this category: the teaching demos, writing groups, and reading groups. In some ways, teaching demos are different from writing and reading groups, but if we see the demos as community presentations and including the coaching that goes along with the presentation, then I think they all fit together. 

What Chelsea needs to identify is what is reflective about each of these sites of reflection? What is the nature of this reflection she says is transformative and how would we identify instances of this reflection to study it? 

My initial thoughts are that the double-movement of reflection is a bit different in each instance, and elaborating on the characteristics in each setting will be very interesting. Generally speaking, though, the double-movement is between self and other. 

1. my teaching experience >< other's teaching experience
2. me as writer >< my students as writers (writing teacher >< writing student)
3. me as scholar, writer, teacher >< others as scholar, writer, teacher

In each of these sites, the interplay between self and other causes teachers to expand beyond their previous thinking and practices and experience "validation of knowledge." 

Since the interplay of reflection appears to be so much between self and other in this context, I'm thinking that Donna Qualley's notions of reflexivity might not apply. I'm going to tack in a passage I wrote on Qualley from a graduate paper:

"Qualley defines reflexivity this way: 'reflexivity involves a commitment to attending to what we believe, think, and feel while examining how we came to hold those beliefs, thoughts, and feelings.  This kind of monitoring and self-awareness seems critical for enabling us to grasp new ideas and information'(41). ¹ She contrasts 'earned insights' with 'ready-made conclusions':  'I comprehend an earned insight to be a kind of understanding whose essential truth is only realized or more fully grasped as it is made manifest through the individual's experience and contemplation of that experience' (35). Ready-made conclusions, in contrast, are packaged truths received uncritically by the learner.  Reflection upon experience is one important means of crystallizing 'earned insights.'"

Qualley distinguishes reflexivity from reflection. She sees reflection as self-oriented, but reflexivity is a "bidirectional contrastive response" to an "other" (12). Reflexivity is triggered by this dialectical engagement with the other--"an other idea, theory, person, culture, text, or even an other part of one's self" (11). Along with Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, she believes this "reflexive dialogue" has incredible power--like opening Pandora's box. 

I believe what Chelsea is identifying in her study is the "reflexive dialogue" between self and other that occurs in these three different ways within the SI experience of NWP. I know that her discussion has helped me see my SI experience in another light that helps to explain why it was so powerful.

I've spent most of my post talking about Chelsea's presentation, so I'll now turn briefly to my own presentation. Working on this presentation was a good experience for me because I finally was able to get down some of the thinking I have been having for an article I have had in my head for at least four months. I see now that the overall structure of this article will flow this way:

1. Display our current bias toward viewing reflection in post-task ways (curricular reflection, portfolio-centric view of reflection)
2. Broaden our perspective on reflection by exploring the views of Dewey, Schon, Boud, and Kolb
3. Elaborate on the added perspective of rhetorical reflection: define it, how it works, and why it is important
4. I guess I should add in the additional part of how to use this kind of reflection in the classroom

I don't know that this article will go into depth about the research and research results. I need to think of target journals but of course I'd like to get in CCC, but perhaps Comp Forum, Comp Studies or even English Journal might be a target. Beyond that, I could trim it to go in TETYC and forfront the pedagogy more. 

Anyway, what I discovered when I woke up today was that by doing this presentation I had finally begun working on this article. Hurray!

Mezirow, Jack. Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-

Bass, 1991.

Qualley, Donna. Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry.

Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997.

Qualley, Donna and Christine Chiseri-Strater. "Collaboration as Reflexive Dialogue: A Knowing 'Deeper Than Reason. "JAC  Vol. 14, 1.